I bought this book after meeting Rosemary Alexander at The English Gardening School. Explains each stage of design process, clearly written and even as an amateur I picked up some good tips. Now studying by distance learning!

This is a great guide to growing this most medicinal plants. There are several close-up photos where you feel like you are sitting right on a branch of the plant. It is about time there was a book on gardening the natural way -- out of the closet and into the yard. Give the plants sunlight rather than electricity. This slim book explain's much about the plant's needs and even how to make seeds for next year's garden.

Alexander Kennedy knows his Satsuki!

These Japanese azaleas are wonderful as either bonsai or additions to any garden, as they extend the blooming season into May! Satsuki azaleas can have many different colors and patterns on just one plant!

Kennedy does a great job giving the Western reader an introduction to their cultivation and enjoyment. Topics include how to properly take cuttings of satsuki in order to ensure proper flower color, how to train young plants for future bonsai, and where to find the plants. Anyone interested in starting a collection would benefit from this book.

Cannon's book Keepers of the Garden deals with a client of hers, who undergoes regression and recalls details of past lives. The fascinating aspect that this book focuses on is that the client in question recalls experiences that identify him as an extra-terrestial being. The book catalogues his past experiences on alien planets and on earth and attempts to unravel the connections between them. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I am a discerning reader and do not believe everything I read and certainly this book pushes the boundaries between fact and fiction. Draw whatever conclusions you want from this book. Whatever your belief system, it provides some valuable lessons. Those in the 'KNOW' will benefit greatly from this book, as it is a real wake up call. It may also be of assistance to victims of alien abductions as an alternative explanation for their experiences. I found this book an easy and quick read as most of the text is in question and answer format. Watch out for the revelation at the end as to the past life of the subject which lead to his present incarnation. About as an impressive job as you can get. Highly recommended.

I have read this book 3 times since 1993, and am now reading it for the 4th time. I never tire of it.

One of the best books I have ever read..... and trust me, I have read them all, or atleast most of all.......... Just be open minded and give this a shot...... You will not lose anything, but gain everything you have ever wanted.

Hemingway, at his best, was a master of the short story form and a reasonably good, though not outstanding, novelist. At his death he left a number of unfinished manuscripts, material in various stages of development that he was working on and, in some cases, struggling with. Knowing this, I hesitated to pick this book up for a long time, not wanting to read the master's own discards and figuring he knew what was good enough for publication and what was not and that what he left, at his death, was manifestly not.

Reading ISLANDS IN THE STREAM some years back, I felt confirmed in this belief for that was a clumsy and self-absorbed effort and I think he must have known that. Later, I had a similar experience when I tried TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT, the most recent posthumous addition to his opus. More recently, however, I was bored for lack of fresh reading material and so picked up THE GARDEN OF EDEN to read on a plane trip.

Although this one was unfinished at his death and ends in such a fashion as to drive that sad point home, it is nevertheless outstanding Hemingway. Aside from a few lapses here and there and the usual Hemingway tendency toward an almost juvenile self-absorption, this one positively hums with the power of the old Hemingway prose. As sharp and subtle as his best short fiction and as fresh and dynamic as his best novel, THE SUN ALSO RISES, this book unfolds, in crisply vivid detail, the struggle of a youthful writer to hang onto his sense of self-worth and devotion to his work in the face of his passionate love for a difficult and spoiled woman.

Yet it's plain why Hemingway may have agonized over this one and held it back from publication, for the man it reveals is not the public persona he cultivated for most of his life. The protagonist in this tale, an avatar of the author (as in most of his works), is here a passive and unassertive sort who is unable to deal effectively with the woman he has married. Instead he succumbs to one of her whims after another though he feels they will somehow unman him, allowing her to change him outwardly while losing himself in the satisfaction of his writing, the only thing, besides his wife, we are led to believe he really loves. And yet when his wife brings another woman into their lives to create a menage a trois, the hero does not rebel though he finds himself more and more a plaything of the two women. Is he flattered by their attention and sexual interest, though his wife takes delight in being able to control and manipulate him to her will? And is she jealous of the one thing he has outside of her, his writng, and is that the motive that drives her to turn him into a creature she can wholly control?

Hemingway's best works were rooted in his own life experiences and, indeed, as he plumbed those, his well went regrettably dry in his later years, something he sensed and agonized over at the end. Yet this tale is fresh and alive in ways that many of his other later works were not. The one really regrettable thing about it was that he never finished it so there are still some rough parts, where his control slips and he says what he should be implying (by his own famous dictum) and the end tails off into an insipid and half-baked moment of insight leaving the reader feeling cheated.

Hemingway, had he focused on this one and finished it in his lifetime, would not have let it stand this way. But it's plain why he did not for this was not the man he wanted others to see. Still, this one is finely wrought and true, for the most part, to the old Hemingway "voice" and talent. I'm not sorry I finally broke down and read it.

Garden of Eden was published approximately 20 years after Hemingway's death. Carlos Baker, author of one of the most thorough Hemingway biography, described the manuscript as being lengthy and not very good. Thus, many were surprised when Garden of Eden was published in a shortened version, and was quite good. The novel explores themes of sexuality not touched on in Hemingway's other works, but present in his life. The writing, while not his absolute best, compares quite favorably to Old Man and the Sea, and Across the River and Into the Trees. It is far superior to Islands in the Stream, Hemingway's other major posthumous work. It is impossible to know how much of the strength of this book is due to the editing or comes from the original manuscript. Nevertheless, it deserved to be published and should be read by anyone who admires Hemingway's work.

I became a writer largely out of love and admiration for Ernest Hemingway. Old Man and the Sea is his best in my opinion, but this one is my favorite. So much of Hemingway's work is loosely autobiographical, so many protagonists modeled after himself. But in his earlier works, when he gets to the deepest parts of these men, he pulls back, or shies away with emotional distance or some other kind of evasion. There is no such evasion in the Garden of Eden. This book is his most vulnerable, tender and humbling portrait of so many of the central struggles of his life.

It is difficult to separate Hemingway the man from Hemingway the writer and for that matter Hemingway the character in his own writing. He encouraged them to be confused in his own way during his life and was a major contributor to the blossoming of our current culture of celebrity obsession. So it's not invalid in my opinion to read his work as part of the greater story of his life and find meaning in it from that perspective.

In this book, Hemingway finally takes on some of the painful issues of his life. There's a great deal of sexual intrigue in The Garden of Eden, specifically about gender and identity. David and Catherine, the two main characters, do some fascinating and disturbing play with their genders and their relationship with each other as a man and a woman. A lot of people have theorized that one of the contributing factors to Hemingway's suicide had to do with his conflicted sexuality which he hid for most of his life. As a child he was raised as a girl until the age of four or five by his mother who had wanted a daughter. Aside from that, there was a history of cross dressing in his family, which also tragically played out in a subsequent generation with Hemingway's son Gregory AKA Gloria.

We see him delve into one of the great traumas of his writing life -- when his wife (was is Pauline or Hadley?) lost an entire suitcase full of his writing including all the carbon copies, in the middle to early part of his career. This incident is replayed in this novel and dealt with on a much deeper level than is mentioned in a Moveable Feast.

We are also able to see in The Garden of Eden a more complex heroine and a more fragile and intertwined relationship than is presented in any of Hemingway's other works. This again is another major issue of Hem's life story -- why was he married 5 times? what were these relationships like and what was it about him and each of the women that contributed to this? Though The Garden doesn't give any answers, it is fascinating to see the questions touched upon and explored in a more honest and vulnerable way than in his other work.

It is true that this novel is disturbing. I wouldn't describe reading it as a feel-good experience. But after a while, feel-good experiences become a little one note and this is something more interesting. There is an exquisite kind of mourning and desolation that runs through this book, and yet at the same time some of his most voluptuous writing about food and sex and his surroundings. The tension is breathtaking, yet at the same time heartwrenching as you can almost feel it all becoming too much for him.

I love this book. It is in my top ten of all time. And I know almost everyone would disagree with me, but I think this book is more than worth reading. It's a precious final window into the soul of one of the greatest writers of our time.

ps. A caveat: Read a couple other Hemingway novels before you read this one, if you haven't.

Although the information in the book is detailed, more pictures are needed to give some idea how these trees and shrubs might actually enhance a garden. The photos contained in the book are sparse and are entirely in black and white. Pictures in books? Generally not needed, but in a gardening book, good graphics are essential.

Book hard to find - but Amazon has on used book list. Order revised edition, think it is 1990 version. Lots of basic help for those of us taming or creating our own woodlands gardens and trying to sort through what we have growing wild, what to edit, what is invasive, placement for sun, soil, water conditions. Written in the 1940s and updated by hands-on garden experts Uof W and Seattle. I view it as a core reference.

Very comprehensive, detailed, informative, and practical guide/reference source for information on trees and shrubs in the Pacific Northwest. From the amount of information in the book probably only very little is missing. Even though it is small print, very dense, very few illustrations, it is nevertheless very readable. Very well done.